So, now to the other issue… what was going on with all of these repeated tweets. Out of 1245 tweets, VERY FEW were original.

In Excel, I sorted all the tweets alphabetically. I then also used conditional formatting in Excel to turn duplicate tweets red. (Also of note, if a URL shortener was used, the tweets don’t look like duplicates because they have different URL shortenings – but I hand-coded those.) (You can easily download the Excel file here and look at it yourself.)

Yes, the same accounts tended to be the ones that were writing the same tweets. There are many examples of this. In fact, the majority of the hashtag was this kind of tweet.

I’m not making any conclusions, but I wanted to point out that a lot of the same people are posting the exact same tweet and that is strange. These accounts seem to be “real” in that these people have since tweeted other things unrelated to the #khadijautan hashtag.

But then I saw a strange pattern – these repeated tweets were all posted a few minutes apart.

If I was a gambler, I’d say that either 1 person was logging into multiple twitter accounts or some sort of program was used.

As always, I am happy to answer questions about this.

EDIT: ADDED 12PM PACIFIC

Here’s an example of a couple of Twitter accounts where the same two tweets are posted in a row by multiple accounts.